


One of the First of Us

by firecat



Category: Altered Carbon (TV), RoboCop (2014)
Genre: Crossover, Cyborgs, Envoys, Identity, Kissing, M/M, Same Performer in Different Roles, Sleeves (Altered Carbon), Smoking, Soldiers, Stacks - Freeform, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25305286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecat/pseuds/firecat
Summary: Takeshi Kovacs has always wanted to meet Alex Murphy, the Robocop from way back in 2014. Murphy's long dead, of course, but a VR construct was once made of his mind.
Relationships: Alex Murphy | Robocop/Takeshi Kovacs
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Froday Flash Fiction Little & Monthly Specials 2020





	One of the First of Us

**Author's Note:**

> FFFC 100th Special Challenge  
> Table D: Fairytale/Fantasy/SciFi  
> Written for the prompt: 34) cyborg

The VR they “meet” in looks like an office. Offices have looked the same the galaxy over for centuries. Probably existed before the Big Bang, too. Chrome, ugly lighting, too many people semi-enclosed in walls that are both too short and too tall. All soldiers are equally uncomfortable in an office. That means it’s neutral ground. 

Kovacs sits back in his chair. (Appearing to “lounge” in a straightbacked chair is something every soldier has to master.) He looks Alex Murphy up and down. 

Murphy’s body is almost entirely machine. Only his right hand and face are visible, with its long, aquiline nose, its firm, serious lips, its angry, deepset eyes. When he sits or stands or moves, servo motors whine inside his mechanical form.

His voice is still human. Quiet, but with a hard, dark edge. Matching the eyes. 

The sleeve Kovacs is wearing is tall, gaunt, and wiry. It wasn’t in good condition when it went on ice, and Kovacs wonders again why he was dumped into it. His cheeks are hollow. His dirty blond hair unkempt, flopping over his eyes. The sleeve’s addicted to nicotine, so he chain-smokes in VR—it soothes the addiction a little, without harming his biological body.

He has the same angry eyes as Murphy, he knows. The defiance that’s buried under a layer of false mildness in Murphy is overt in him. Has been for a long time. But he thinks his voice, although gravelly, sounds a little more unsure. 

“Mr Kovacs, I understand your name is?” says the VR construct that was drawn from Murphy’s brain back in the runnels of time. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” 

“Curiosity,” replies Kovacs casually. “Ended up on Earth after 250 years on ice. Heard about your construct being stored here. Always wondered. After all, you’re one of the first of us.” 

He takes a drag on his cigarette, brushes his hair back from his forehead. It flops right back into his eyes again.

Murphy is gazing at him with an indefinable emotion on his face. Kovacs is a tad surprised. As an Envoy, he can usually read emotions so keenly, he knows what people are feeling before they do. But he can’t tell what this one is. 

“How so, ‘the first of us’?” says Murphy. His servo motors whine as he picks up a glass from the table. He sips the unknown liquid, then licks his wide lips. 

Kovacs wishes he had a drink, too. His lips feel suddenly dry. He doesn’t bother to order one up, though. Just sucks on the cigarette again, trying to draw deep. A lungful of tobacco doesn’t feel the same in virtual, though. 

“One of the first to combine artificial and biological, to be augmented for the purpose of being a soldier,” Kovacs clarifies.

Murphy’s lips twist in distaste. Kovacs isn’t sure if the response is aimed at him, his words, or the whole sick concept of bioengineered human–machine hybrid soldiers. He hopes it’s the last. 

“I’m not the same as you at all,” objects Murphy. “I ended up a few bits of a human in a machine body.” He raises his arms to punctuate his point. The movements are slightly jerky, glitchy. “I’m primarily a face and most of a brain. For whatever good a brain does, if it can be overridden by programming like mine was.”

“Overridden?” asks Kovacs. He knows the story, but he wants to hear it from Murphy’s lips. 

“The ones who made me like this? I wasn’t good enough for them, not until they’d also taken away my personality, my empathy, my compassion,” Murphy says. “To make me a ‘better’ soldier. A better killing machine.” He looks away, toward the corner of the room. His mouth works. “Supposedly I got myself back. But you know what? _I can’t remember._ What if what I got back wasn’t me after all?”

“Yeah,” says Kovacs. He wants to sympathize, wants to tell Murphy he gets it, truly knows the terror. But he suspects Murphy wouldn’t be able to accept that from him, so he substitutes cynicism instead. “Welcome to the thoughts of everyone who’s ever been resleeved. Except for the Envoys. We were supposed to have had it trained out of us. Let me tell you a secret: We didn’t.”

He “lights” another “cigarette.”

“Uh huh,” Murphy says. “As for you. Your body is human. Augmented with strength, speed, stamina…but still primarily biological. Better than what I’ve got. But your brain? Reconstituted from bunch of ones and zeros? Do you know how easy it is for data to get corrupted? You for sure can’t know you’re the real you. Or—no. You for sure _can_ know that you’re _not._ Frankly, I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything. Except…” 

He lets his final thought go unspoken. Kovacs is curious, but lets it lie.

“Not offering a trade,” says Kovacs. “Trust me, I wouldn’t wish my existence on my worst enemy.”

They exist in silence for a time.

“Anything else you wanna know?” asks Murphy eventually. “I know they charge by the minute in these VRs. You didn’t come here just to watch me fake-breathe.”

“What part of having a human body do you miss most?” Kovacs finds himself asking.

“It’s ironic,” says Murphy. “You would assume I’d say my dick, or something about another part of me I no longer have. But when they replaced all those things, it’s as if they also replaced my memories of the real things. I can’t miss something when I might as well have never had it at all. But I have a face, and a mouth. And so what I miss most? Is actually…kissing.”

Kovacs’s eyes fix on Murphy. On his face. His mouth, flexible and sensuous, rather similar to Kovac’s own. 

And suddenly Kovacs wants him. Like he hasn’t wanted anything in a long, long time.

Kovacs is a battle-hardened, Envoy-trained, assassin who’s existed for coming up on three centuries. He literally has nothing to fear other than a sledge hammer to his stack. 

So why is it so hard to say it?

“I would kiss you,” he says at last.

Murphy glances at him, then drops his eyes, as if he were a shy schoolgirl. That gesture inflames Kovacs all the more.

“I wasn't interested in men that way when I lived,” Murphy says. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think things over since then.” He raises his eyes to Kovacs’s again. “Fuck, yes.”

VR constructs can be rearranged on the fly. Kovacs could simply put himself across the table, next to Murphy. But that doesn’t seem right. So he gets up. Walks slowly around the table, until he reaches Murphy’s side. 

Murphy’s right hand is still human. Kovacs takes it and pulls him out of his chair. The servo motors whine as Murphy stands.

Standing, they’re of a height. Kovacs presses his lips against Murphy’s. 

A slight, artificial tingling sensation. The crappy VR isn’t quite made to handle this kind of interaction. Kovacs doesn’t care. He deepens the kiss and Murphy responds, opening his mouth. Their tongues meet. 

Kovacs has never understood what happened. How he could react like this to the VR-reconstructed program built out of the data-corrupted memories of a cyborg long dead. 

Maybe it’s like that god part of the brain that everyone talks about. How it creates the emotions of worship, even though to most people who live in this world of stacks and sleeves, there’s nothing out there to worship. Except the promise of death, Quellcrist Falconer would say. 

Quellcrist Falconer. Her voice in his head. His lover, once. Surely she would object to his taking another soldier like this.

But she only observes from the background of his overactive brain, smiling slightly. 

The weird thing is that Murphy almost seems as if he’s having the same experience. The memories his construct was built on literally include no experience of this, kissing another man with sexual passion. But his response feels more real than anything else he did or said in this interview. 

Time in sexual ecstasy is weird. Time in a VR is weird. Kovacs doesn’t know if they continue their kiss for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. 

Eventually they part. Gazing into each other’s eyes as if each is catching his first glimpse of a long-missed home. 

“Still not offering to trade,” Kovacs says, and the rough edges of his voice are just that little bit less jagged, the anger in his eyes softened. “I wouldn’t give up these moments of my existence for anyone or anything. Unless it were to have more of you.”

“I still don’t know if the personality I got back is who I used to be,” says Murphy, his eyes half hooded in pleasure. “But now? This me is the one who kissed you, and so this is the me I want to stay.”

“There’s life in the old code yet, eh?” chuckles Kovacs. 

“Strangely enough. We know data corrupts. I guess sometimes corruption is synonymous with learning.”

It’s time for Kovacs to leave. He doesn’t know when he will be able to come back. Murphy’s construct is stored only here. On sneakernet. He isn’t available anywhere else. He can’t be needlecast. 

Kovacs doesn’t mind. He will find a way. Finding a way is what he has been trained for all his life.

“Until the next time,” Kovacs says. 

He holds Murphy’s human hand until the construct vanishes with a pixelated shiver. 

Kovacs comes to on the couch in the VR emporium. For the first time since he found himself in this sleeve, he doesn’t crave a cigarette.

**Author's Note:**

> Joel Kinnaman played both Robocop (in the 2014 film) and Takeshi Kovacs (in season 1 of Altered Carbon).


End file.
